This question highlighted a humorously incorrect use of Elizabethan-era English in a television commercial and asked how it was incorrect. In the original version of the question (since edited), the questioner added "(Hint: the problem is with the verbs.)" This question was then closed as "off-topic," with the following reason given:
Proofreading questions are off-topic unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.
Do you see what's wrong here? (Hint: the problem is with the part about "unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified.")
Throughout the Stack Exchange network, you will find a strong disdain for "do my homework for me"-type questions, in which the questioner is clearly more interested in getting an answer than in understanding it. The prohibition on homework questions is fairly widespread, with different sites phrasing it in different ways:
On photography – “fix my picture” questions are off topic, (but specific technique requests are allowed).
Stack Overflow is about programming, but programming questions you’d solve on a whiteboard or that ask what’s wrong with a large block of code are no good.
At ELU, "do my homework for me" questions most often come in the form of questions that give a sentence or a paragraph and ask "What's wrong with this?" One pictures a student in an English class who's been handed an assignment and decides that asking people on Stack Exchange to answer it for free is easier than figuring out the answer—or even understanding the question—herself. It is to deal with these kinds of questions that the "proofreading" close reason exists.
This ELU blog post explains nicely the circumstances under which the "proofreading" close reason is appropriate:
At the same time, EL&U-SE has a policy that prohibits proofreading questions. Does this mean that we don’t want to help people get better at English and that we’re only here for discussing obscure questions about grammar? Of course not! The entire point of EL&U-SE, and every other SE site, is to help people learn about the subject matter. The reason we don’t allow proofreading questions is because there is nothing to be gained by a simple proofreading question—true, a sentence will be improved, but the author does not benefit from experience, nor does the community benefit, as it is statistically unlikely that some other person will come up with the same sentence.
Certainly, we could identify all the errors in a piece of writing, but that doesn’t teach the author about pronoun-antecdent agreement, about idiomatic uses, or about the differences between to, too, and two. We’d love to teach our friends about these things so that they can benefit in the long-term. So while we don’t allow general proofreading requests, proofreading requests that identify a specific area of concern are welcome.
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In summary, proofreading questions, when they identify the area of concern, are welcome on EL&U-SE.
A big problem we have on ELU, and I see this in action almost every day, is that of moderators or close-voters deciding "I don't like this question" and then selecting whatever close reason seems to be closest to the reason they don't like it. That's not how it's supposed to work. If the proofreading reason says "unless a specific source of concern in the text is clearly identified," and the question clearly identifies a specific source of concern, then you don't get to use that reason to close the question. If you can't find any close reason that fits, then maybe you shouldn't be voting to close the question at all.
